Before Belief: When Faith Meant Trust
Modern Christians tend to treat faith as a checklist of propositions. Do you believe in the resurrection? The Trinity? The virgin birth? Check the right boxes and you are in. Teresa Morgan, the McDonald Agape Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Yale Divinity School, argues that this framing would have baffled the earliest followers of Jesus. For them, faith was not primarily about intellectual assent. It was about trust -- a lived, relational, full-bodied commitment that had far more in common with family loyalty than with theological examinations.
Morgan traces the Greek word pistis and its Latin counterpart fides through their pre-Christian usage, where they saturated every corner of ancient social life. These were the words for the trust between parents and children, the credit extended between merchants, the faithfulness expected (and frequently betrayed) in political life. They were everyday relational terms, not abstract philosophical ones.
Greek pistis and Latin fides are the terms that we translate as "faith" or "belief." In the Greek and the Latin of their day, these terms meant trust, faithfulness, trustworthiness, entrustedness, or good faith. For very early Christians, pistis language centrally meant trust.
The implications ripple outward. If the foundational Christian concept was trust rather than belief, then the entire architecture of orthodoxy -- creeds, catechisms, heresy trials -- represents not a deepening of that original vision but a departure from it.
The Pagan Trust Deficit
One of the most striking claims in this interview is the contrast Morgan draws between Greco-Roman polytheism and Jewish-Christian monotheism on the question of divine reliability. The gods of Olympus were powerful, capricious, and thoroughly untrustworthy. Zeus might help you or destroy you depending on his mood. Worshippers approached the gods with offerings and petitions, but rarely with the kind of vulnerable confidence that characterizes the Psalms or the letters of Paul.
There was a lot of debate about whether you could trust the gods. They were often not trustworthy, and that's one of the big differences between mainstream polytheism and Judaism and Christianity: for Jews and Christians, God is absolutely trustworthy, and that's a huge new thing in that world.
This is a genuinely powerful historical observation. In a Mediterranean world where divine caprice was simply assumed, the claim that God is utterly faithful -- that the divine-human relationship runs on trust rather than appeasement -- would have been radical. It reframes early Christianity not as one more mystery cult competing for market share, but as a fundamentally different proposition about the nature of the cosmos.
A skeptic might note, however, that the Hebrew Bible itself contains plenty of moments where God's trustworthiness is tested by his own actions -- the binding of Isaac, the suffering of Job, the destruction of entire peoples. The assertion that God is "absolutely trustworthy" requires a particular theological lens, one that reads these narratives as ultimately redemptive rather than as evidence of the same divine unpredictability that characterized the pagan gods.
How Belief Displaced Trust
Morgan identifies a specific historical window -- roughly the second through fourth centuries -- during which belief gradually overtook trust as the primary meaning of Christian faith. The causes she identifies are multiple and overlapping: external attacks that forced Christians to defend their ideas as rational and coherent, internal debates about the nature of Christ, and the influential adoption of Platonist philosophical vocabulary by major early theologians.
We can give a definite date for the moment when belief became officially central to Christianity because the creed that was developed at the Council of Nicaea was the first statement of belief that the whole of the church was supposed to sign up to. It was created to test whether somebody was a legitimate member of the church based on what they believed -- to test for heresy.
The Nicene Creed of 325 CE, in Morgan's telling, was not originally a prayer or a liturgical text. It was a loyalty test. The fact that it later became a staple of Sunday worship obscures its origins as an instrument of institutional boundary-drawing. This is a useful corrective for anyone who assumes the creed has always functioned the way it does today.
What Morgan does not fully explore is whether the shift from trust to belief was entirely a loss. Doctrinal clarity served real functions: it provided coherence across a rapidly expanding and geographically dispersed movement, it created shared vocabulary for theological disputes that might otherwise have fractured the community entirely, and it gave converts a concrete framework for understanding what they were joining. The early centuries of Christianity were chaotic and violent, with competing gospels, rival bishops, and Christological positions that ranged from the adoptionist to the docetic. Without some mechanism for defining boundaries, the movement might not have survived at all. Trust is beautiful, but it does not by itself answer the question of what, exactly, one is trusting in.
The Reciprocal God
Perhaps the most theologically suggestive part of the interview is Morgan's discussion of "entrustedness" -- the idea that God does not merely receive human trust but actively extends trust to humanity. She grounds this in the parable of the talents, where faithful stewards are described as pistos (trustworthy), and in Paul's self-description as one "entrusted by God with preaching the gospel."
Part of God's faithfulness to us is that God trusts us. God trusts us, for instance, by sending Jesus into the world to build a bridge between God and an alienated humanity. God trusts us to recognize Jesus -- to recognize God with us in Jesus Christ, which is a big act of trust when you think about it.
This is a striking theological move. The standard framing positions humans as the trusters and God as the trusted. Morgan inverts this, suggesting that the Incarnation itself was an act of divine vulnerability. God could have arrived in unmistakable glory but instead chose to come as a carpenter from Nazareth, trusting that people would recognize what they were seeing. By this reading, the entire drama of salvation depends on God taking a risk on human perception.
It is an appealing image, though it raises difficult questions. If God trusted humanity to recognize Jesus, and the vast majority of Jesus's contemporaries did not, does that trust look more like hope than confidence? And what does it mean for a supposedly omniscient being to "trust" -- a concept that inherently involves uncertainty about outcomes? Morgan does not address these tensions, perhaps because the interview format does not lend itself to the kind of extended philosophical engagement they require.
Holding Faith for Each Other
Morgan closes with pastoral counsel that is both honest and moving. Asked how to reconcile faith and intellectual inquiry, she does not pretend the tension does not exist. Instead, she offers two paths: for those with a strong sense of the divine, intellectual exploration is simply joyful investigation. For those who struggle, the community itself becomes the vessel of trust.
One of the incredibly important things about Christian tradition and Christian community is that we hold our faith for each other, and on the days when we wobble or we can't hear or feel God, then we know that there are people around us who do still hear and feel and see the presence of God. And we hold that faith for each other.
This is a communitarian vision of faith that echoes the original relational meaning of pistis. It also, perhaps unintentionally, highlights one of the vulnerabilities of trust-based faith. If the community is what holds you when your personal sense of the divine fails, then the health of that community becomes load-bearing in a way that belief-based faith is not. Beliefs can be held in isolation; trust cannot. For those without a strong Christian community -- and surveys consistently show declining church attendance across the West -- the question of where to find that communal trust becomes urgent.
Bottom Line
Morgan makes a compelling case that modern Christianity has drifted from its relational roots, replacing the lived trust of pistis with the cognitive demands of creedal belief. The historical evidence she marshals is persuasive, and her vision of a reciprocal trust between God and humanity is theologically rich. The interview is strongest when it stays in the ancient world, tracing how a relational concept was gradually institutionalized into a doctrinal one. It is less convincing when it implies that trust alone can sustain a global religion without the structural scaffolding that belief provides. Still, for readers who have felt that something essential has been lost in the modern emphasis on "believing the right things," Morgan offers a historically grounded alternative -- and a reminder that for the first Christians, faith was not a test to pass but a relationship to inhabit.